Trailrunner7 writes: The U.S. has by far the highest number of bot-infected computers of any country in the world, with nearly four times as many infected PCs as the country in second place, Brazil, according to a new report by Microsoft. The quarterly report on malicious software and Internet attacks shows that while some of the major botnets have been curtailed in recent months, the networks of infected PCs still represent a huge threat.

The data on botnets, published in Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report for the first half of 2010, paints a somewhat bleak picture of the botnet landscape. Between January and June of this year, Microsoft cleaned more than 6.5 million machines worldwide of bot infections, which represents a 100 percent increase in bot infections from the same period in 2009. This increase comes at a time when there is more attention than ever focused on the botnet problem, both by security researchers and law-enforcement agencies around the world.

iqrash writes: Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitorize as many services as possible. At this time it monitors from the CPU load and temperatures to the users using the system. Network devices activity, network services demand and even the devices’ interrupt activity are also monitored, and more. The current status of any corporate server with Monitorix installed can be accessed via a web browser.

It has been designed to be used under production UNIX/Linux servers, but due its simplicity and small size you may also use it to monitor embedded devices.

All its development was initially created for monitoring Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS Linux systems, so this project was made keeping in mind these distributions. Today it runs on different Linux distributions and even in other UNIX systems like FreeBSD.

schliz writes: Australian researchers have won a $10,000 defence science grant for multi-object tracking algorithms that use random set theory to model targets. Using their approach, the researchers say commercial, off-the-shelf laptops could replace custom-built "supercomputers" with more than ten times their processing power in submarines.